We believe belonging is an essential concept for thinking about inclusion and planning successful policies—so important we included it twice! In addition to adopting a belonging-focused definition of inclusion in Change #1, one of our four planning approaches focuses on facilitating pupil belonging.
Guidance Part 1: An Introduction to School-level Approaches for Developing Inclusive Policy – Belonging in School – a school-level resource for developing inclusive policies
Belonging is a human need. Yet the new psychology shows that it’s also something more. It’s a birthright. It’s a value that defines us human beings and a deeply-felt principle that points the way to solving diverse problems facing individuals, communities, and whole societies today. While this insight might seem new, it is, in fact, as ancient as humanity itself.
The New Psychology of Belonging | Psychology Today
- Inclusion as Belonging
- Belonging and Psychological Safety
- Belonging and Legibility
- Belonging and Authenticity
- Belonging and Home
- Belonging and Connection
- Belonging and Place
- Belonging and Evolution
- Belonging and Power
- Belonging and Purpose
- This Space Is For Us
- We Will Build It
- Take me home where I belong.
- Related Reading
Inclusion as Belonging
As our title signals, we focus on discussing and facilitating inclusion in terms of pupils’ sense of belonging, which is to say learners’ subjective sense of whether or not they are part of their school community, safe, and valued. This connects to a larger research on understanding school belonging, and how it impacts pupils. As discussed in more detail under Approach 1 in the Planning Guidance document, this body of research suggests that it may be an important contributor to pupils’ participation and achievement, rather than following from these later.
Guidance Part 1: An Introduction to School-level Approaches for Developing Inclusive Policy – Belonging in School – a school-level resource for developing inclusive policies
A sense of not belonging at school can hinder learning and lead to disaffection and active disengagement from learning.
Nearly 80% of Australian students say they ‘didn’t fully try’ in latest Pisa tests | Australian education | The Guardian
There also appears to be a close relationship between the sense of belonging and reading scores across most OECD countries. While there are exceptions, most OECD countries including Australia have experienced declining student engagement with learning and school and declines in PISA results since 2003.
Nearly 4 in 5 Australian Students Didn’t Fully Try in PISA Tests – SOS Australia
A sense of not belonging at school can result in less motivation, effort and participation learning. It and lead to disaffection and active disengagement from learning.
Nearly 4 in 5 Australian Students Didn’t Fully Try in PISA Tests – SOS Australia
Belonging and Psychological Safety
In the hierarchy of needs, psychological safety straddles fulfillment, belonging, and security needs—three of the four basic need categories (figure 3). Once the basic physical needs of food and shelter are met, psychological safety becomes a priority.
The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety
Belonging and Legibility
If privilege is not needing to learn, then honor feels like learning enough about people for them to be legible to us.
Being legible requires other people to have the ability to make sense of me. That means I am a thing that exists but that is also supposed to exist, in a given space or conversation or exchange.
Why I Hate* California – essaying
Narrating the Many Autisms | Identity, Agency, Mattering | Anna Stenni
To act in the world, we must regard ourselves from the first-person perspective, as ‘agents, capable of choice, deliberation, and practical reason’ (Mackenzie 2008: 8 – see Chapter 1). Through discovery, memory, and critical interpretation, we exercise agency over our experiences, even if this does not produce narrative closure or completeness. If we consider ourselves to be part of a community, our practical identity will be intelligible to us insofar as it may also make sense to others within such; in this way, it reflects the ‘modes of personhood’ available to us from without our culture or community (Lucas 2016: 12). For instance, the autistic self-advocacy movement has, contrary to cognitivist models of autism, affirmed that autism is a way of being a person: as Jim Sinclair affirmed, ‘My selfhood is undamaged … I find great value and meaning in my life, and I have no wish to be cured of being myself’ (1992: 302). Within the self-advocacy community, autism is a valid way of being a person, and this requires skepticism toward any approach that regards autism as a core deficit
Narrating the Many Autisms | Identity, Agency, Mattering | Anna Stenni
Belonging and Authenticity
The privilege of being oneself is a gift many take for granted, but for the autistic person, being allowed to be oneself is the greatest and rarest gift of all.
Autism and Asperger Syndrome in Children: For parents of the newly diagnosed
Never forget that authenticity and vulnerability are revolutionary in every capacity. Shame is the antithesis of progress.
The Journey of Undoing: An open letter to who needs it — SITI Girl Miami
The purest forms of belonging enable us to exist as unique, authentic beings within a larger whole, and yet to experience that whole within the multiplicity. The following lines in Walt Whitman’s epic poem “Song of Myself” in his evoke this feeling:
On Belonging: Finding Connection in an Age of Isolation by Kim SamuelI CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume;
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
Belonging and Home
A school struggling with the ravages of American poverty has to first be a home — the kind of home the children may not have at home. A place that is relentlessly safe, that is both calming and exciting, that offers unconditional love, and that offers boundless opportunity.
That ‘home’ must be supportive and accepting, loving and encouraging, and it must provide the biggest possible window on to the world, on to the universe.
A home of opportunity.
What does opportunity look like? First, it looks like trust. It looks like freedom. And it looks like choice.
You must see your school as a home of opportunity | by Ira David Socol | Medium
Belonging and Connection
Belonging—in this broader sense—isn’t just, as Maslow posited, a human need. It’s a fundamental right. It’s a principle from which all other needs flow. This is to say that belonging—our connectedness to humanity, nature, and meaning—is what animates us to seek food, clothing, shelter, and all the necessities of human survival in the first place.
The New Psychology of Belonging | Psychology Today
In contrast, Indigenous traditions around the world have emphasized broader conceptions of belonging since time immemorial. For the Nuu-chah-nulth peoples of the Pacific Northwest, for example, the organizing principle of the interconnectedness of human beings—as well as the natural world—is encapsulated in the organizing principle of Tsawalk_, _meaning “one.” Belonging is a fundamental birthright.
The New Psychology of Belonging | Psychology Today
Msit No'kmaq For all the life The trees The air This is how we end our prayer Way ha Way ha hey ho
Msit No’kmaq by Morgan Toney
Belonging and Place
Our connection to place happens through a relationship with nature, with the lands on which we live, whether in a forest or a city neighborhood. In an ideal relationship of belonging to place, this relationship is reciprocal: We care for the places where we live and they, in turn, care for us. We have a responsibility toward our lands, which is ultimately a responsibility for our own well-being. When we feel a sense of belonging in a physical place or a natural ecosystem, we feel at home. We feel peace. We don’t simply feel a need to extract whatever we can for our short-term personal benefit. It means we live in reciprocity with nature, and it entails a commitment to honoring, preserving, and enriching this relationship.
On Belonging: Finding Connection in an Age of Isolation by Kim Samuel
Belonging and Evolution
Belonging has been such a fundamental driver in human culture that nearly all major wisdom traditions of humankind—which contain the oldest stories of who we are—point the way back to it. Mystics such as Meister Eckhart and Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī speak of a belonging so elemental that no “inside” or “outside” exists, no self that is separate from the other, no Lover separate from the Beloved.
On Belonging: Finding Connection in an Age of Isolation by Kim Samuel
On Belonging: Finding Connection in an Age of Isolation by Kim Samuel
Belonging and Power
On Belonging: Finding Connection in an Age of Isolation by Kim Samuel
Belonging and Purpose
On Belonging: Finding Connection in an Age of Isolation by Kim Samuel
This Space Is For Us
It is very rare, as a disabled person, that I have an intense sense of belonging, of being not just tolerated or included in a space but actively owning it; “This space,” I whisper to myself, “is for me.” Next to me, I sense my friend has the same electrified feeling. This space is for us.
This is precisely why they are needed: as long as claiming our own ground is treated as an act of hostility, we need our ground. We need the sense of community for disabled people created in crip space.
How can we cultivate spaces where everyone has that soaring sense of inclusion, where we can have difficult and meaningful conversations?
Because everyone deserves the shelter and embrace of crip space, to find their people and set down roots in a place they can call home.
“The Beauty of Spaces Created for and by Disabled People” by s.e. smith in “Disability Visibility: First Person Stories from the 21st Century“
We Will Build It
The spaces where we belong do not exist. We build them with radical love and revolutionary liberation.
Gayatri Sethi, Unbelonging